⚠ Paul had never been to Colossae. He says so at 2:1 — “those who have not seen my face” — and the congregation was founded not by him but by Epaphras, a local man (v7). Colossae was a small, declining wool town in the Lycus valley of Phrygia, overshadowed by its neighbours Laodicea and Hierapolis; an earthquake struck the valley around AD 60 and Colossae never really recovered. It is the least important place any New Testament letter is addressed to, and it received one of the highest statements about Christ ever written.

The greeting is clipped. Almost every Pauline greeting runs “grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ”; here the second half is simply absent from the earliest text. Later copyists supplied it, and KJV prints the full formula; the critical text stops at “God our Father,” and so do we.

“Bearing fruit and growing.” Karpophoroumenon kai auxanomenon — the gospel is described as a living thing propagating itself “in all the world,” and Paul then uses the identical pair four verses later of the readers themselves (v10), so that what the message does the people do. ⚠ Behind both stands the first command in the Bible, “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28) — the creation mandate turning up as a description of a message spreading.

“Faith, love… because of the hope laid up for you.” The famous triad, and the logic is worth catching: hope is not the third item in a list here but the ground of the other two — faith and love exist “because of” a hope already stored up. Apokeimenēn is a banking and warehousing word, used of money on deposit.

“Epaphras, our beloved fellow slave.” Syndoulos — not “colleague” but fellow slave, which places Paul and the local evangelist on precisely the same footing. It matters, because Paul is writing to correct a congregation he did not found, on the strength of a report from the man who did. KJV “our dear fellowservant”; NWT “our beloved fellow slave,” which keeps the harder word.

⚠ Watch which words Paul chooses to pray for. Epignōsis (full knowledge), sophia (wisdom), synesis (understanding), plērōthēte (be filled) — and later plērōma (fullness), teleios (mature/perfect), mystērion. These are the buzzwords of whatever was troubling Colossae: some blend of Jewish observance, ascetic rigour, angel-veneration and claims to special insight, which chapter 2 attacks directly (“let no one disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions…”). Paul does not avoid their vocabulary. He prays it back at them, filled with different content — a rhetorical move worth watching for, because it means the chapter’s grand words are chosen tactically and not decoratively.

“For all endurance and long-suffering — with joy.” Makrothymia is literally long-temperedness, the opposite of a short fuse. And the last two words are placed where you would expect a full stop: the power is prayed for so that they may put up with things, cheerfully. It is a distinctly unglamorous use of “the might of his glory.” KJV “unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness”; ASV “stedfastness and longsuffering with joy”; NIV “great endurance and patience.”

⚠ “Rescued… and TRANSFERRED us.” Metestēsen — and this is a political word with a hard edge. Hellenistic kings transferred conquered peoples: uprooted a population and resettled it in another territory, which is what Assyria did to Israel and Babylon to Judah. Paul takes the vocabulary of imperial deportation and reverses it — the deportation here is out of captivity, from “the authority of the darkness” into a kingdom. KJV “hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son” (“translated” in its older sense of carried across); ASV “translated us”; NIV “brought us into”; NWT “transferred us,” which is the tighter rendering and the one we follow.

“The Son of his love.” A Semitic construction — a noun in the genitive doing the work of an adjective — which most versions smooth to “his beloved Son.” We keep the shape, since it is one of several signs that the material here is translated or traditional rather than freshly composed Greek.

⚠ Verses 15–20 are almost certainly a HYMN or confession that Paul is quoting — not composing. The signs are the ones scholars look for: a rhythmic, balanced structure in two matched strophes (creation, then reconciliation), each opening “he is… who is… firstborn,” a vocabulary partly unlike Paul’s elsewhere, and a self-contained argument that could be lifted out without leaving a hole. If that is right, this is a window onto what Christians were singing before Paul wrote it down, which makes it among the earliest Christian material in existence. This translation sets it in short lines to let the shape show; the Greek does not have line breaks, and no version is neutral about where to put them.

“The image of the invisible God.” Eikōn — not a copy at a distance but the visible manifestation of the thing itself, the way an emperor’s eikōn on a coin was his presence in the marketplace. And the word reaches back to Genesis 1:26, where humankind is made in God’s image; the hymn is saying that what Adam was made to be, Christ is.

⚠ “Firstborn of all creation” — the phrase the fourth century went to war over. Prōtotokos means firstborn, and the question is whether it places Christ inside creation as its first product or over it as its heir. Both readings have real support in the word itself. For “inside”: the plain sense of the word is temporal priority, and the genitive most naturally reads “firstborn of the class named”; this was the Arian argument, that there was a time when the Son was not. For “over”: in the Greek Old Testament prōtotokos repeatedly means rank rather than birth-order — God calls Israel “my firstborn son” (Exodus 4:22) though Israel is not the oldest nation, and Psalm 89:27 says of David, who was the youngest of eight, “I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth” — and here the very next word is because: he is firstborn because in him all things were created, which makes him the ground of creation rather than an item in it. Greek also had a perfectly clear word for “first-created” (prōtoktistos) and it is not used. The historic decision at Nicaea in 325 went the second way; the library reports the argument and does not adjudicate it.

⚠ The NWT and the four brackets. NWT renders verses 16–17 “by means of him all other things were created… all other things have been created through him… he is before all other things and by means of him all other things were made to exist,” inserting a word four times that is not in any Greek manuscript (older printings bracketed it; later ones do not). The insertion is not accidental — it makes the verses say that Christ created everything except himself, which secures the reading that he is himself a created being. This library’s standing practice is to follow the NWT wherever it is tighter than the familiar rendering, as it is at verse 13 above, and to name a doctrinal rendering as doctrinal when it is one. This is one. KJV, ASV, NIV, Douay and Geneva all read simply “all things,” and so does the Greek.

“In him all things hold together.” Synestēken — perfect tense, “have been and remain held together”; the verb is used of a coherent structure, an army in formation, a body of law. It is the hymn’s most quoted line and the one that goes furthest: not merely that Christ made things but that he is what keeps them from flying apart. And the list in verse 16 — “thrones, lordships, rulers, authorities” — is the vocabulary of the invisible hierarchy the Colossian teachers were evidently anxious about. The hymn does not deny those powers exist. It says he made them.

“Firstborn from among the dead.” The second strophe answers the first: firstborn of creation, and now firstborn from the dead — and here the word plainly means first of a series that continues, since others follow. The two uses standing thirty words apart are part of the case that prōtotokos is being used flexibly.

“All the fullness was pleased to dwell.” Plērōma — the word this library met at Ephesians 1:23, and the word the Colossian teachers were probably using for the graded ranks of divine beings between God and the world. Paul’s answer is that the whole of it settled down in one man. He says it again at 2:9 with the sharpest word available: “in him all the fullness of deity dwells bodily.” ⚠ “Was pleased” has no expressed subject in the Greek — God, or the fullness itself — and the versions supply differently.

⚠ “To reconcile ALL THINGS back to himself.” Apokatallaxai is a double-compound (probably coined for this purpose) meaning to reconcile thoroughly, to bring back into relationship. And the object is startling: not all people but ta panta, all THINGS — the same neuter plural as the creation strophe, explicitly including “the things in the heavens.” The scope of what is being repaired is the scope of what was made. ⚠ How far that goes has been argued since Origen, and the argument is not settled: universal restoration on one reading, the pacification of hostile powers on another. The hymn states the scope and does not explain the mechanism, and neither will we.

“Having made peace through the blood of his cross.” ⚠ Worth noticing where this sentence sits. The cosmic hymn — thrones, lordships, all things visible and invisible — comes to rest on an execution. The most exalted paragraph in the letter ends with a public killing, and the peace is made through the blood. Whoever composed the hymn refused to let the height of it float free of that.

“Enemies in your mind.” Echthrous tē dianoia — the hostility is located in the thinking, and the evil works follow from it rather than the other way round; and apēllotriōmenous, “estranged,” is the word for being made a stranger, alienated from a country or a family.

⚠ “IF INDEED you remain in the faith.” A conditional dropped straight after an unconditional-sounding promise, and one of the places where Paul’s letters resist being tidied into a system. Ei ge is a real condition, not a rhetorical flourish. The reader who wants the preceding sentence to stand alone has to reckon with the clause attached to it; the reader who wants the condition to carry everything has to reckon with the three verses before. The library prints both and leaves them adjacent, as the letter does. KJV “if ye continue in the faith grounded and settled”; NWT “provided, of course, that you continue in the faith.”

“Proclaimed in all creation under heaven.” A deliberate hyperbole of the kind ancient writers used freely, and the same phrase Paul used of the gospel “bearing fruit in all the world” in verse 6. It is worth reading as a claim about the message’s reach and character rather than a census.

⚠ “I fill up what is LACKING of the afflictions of Christ.” This is genuinely difficult and has been since the beginning, because the letter has just said that peace was made through the blood of the cross — so in what sense could anything be lacking? The readings, with their pedigrees: (1) the “messianic woes” — Jewish apocalyptic expected a fixed measure of suffering before the end, and Paul is filling out that quota, not Christ’s atoning work; (2) the body — since the congregation is Christ’s body and Paul suffers “for the sake of his body,” what the head endured the members continue to endure, and Christ suffers in them (compare “why are you persecuting me?”, Acts 9:4); (3) ministerial — what is lacking is not the atonement but its delivery, the cost of carrying it to people, which is what Paul is paying in prison. ⚠ What almost no one argues, including those who disagree about everything else, is that Paul thought the cross insufficient — the same chapter says the opposite twice. The library reports the readings and does not vote. KJV “fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ”; NWT “what is lacking of the tribulations of the Christ.”

“Now I rejoice in my sufferings.” The same note as Philippians 1:29, written from the same imprisonment: suffering is not merely borne but counted a gift and a share.

“The mystery hidden from the ages… but now made plain.” The same structure as Ephesians 1:9 — a secret whose defining property is that it has been told. And as in Ephesians, the content is about the nations: this mystery is “among the Gentiles.” ⚠ It is worth naming what this does to the vocabulary of the Colossian teachers, who evidently traded in special knowledge for insiders. Paul takes their word for the esoteric and announces that its whole point is that it is now public.

⚠ “Christ IN YOU, the hope of glory.” Four words in Greek, and the letter’s centre of gravity. The Colossians were being offered access to the divine through ranks of intermediaries, ascetic discipline and visionary experience; the answer is that what they are looking for is already inside them. En hymin is plural and can mean “in you” individually or “among you” as a body, and both are true here — the letter has just called them a body. KJV “Christ in you, the hope of glory”; Douay the same; NWT “Christ in union with you, the hope of his glory,” which expands the bare preposition into an interpretation.

“Every person… every person… every person.” Three times in one verse, and it is aimed: against a teaching that graded people into the initiated and the rest, Paul insists his gospel is for anybody at all. And teleion, “mature” — a word the mystery-cults used for the fully initiated — is taken over and applied to everyone. KJV “perfect in Christ Jesus”; the sense is completeness, not flawlessness.

“I labor, struggling.” Kopiō is work to the point of exhaustion; agōnizomenos is the athlete’s or the soldier’s contending — the root of agony. The chapter that began before the founding of the world ends with a tired man in chains, and says both are the same energy at work.